The graphics processor
maker revealed today
at HPC 2010
China an incredible new supercomputer, built using NVIDIA's
GPUs which support CUDA, a C-driven technology that allows for the
implementation of parallel computing code on the GPU. The new
supercomputer is named Tianhe-1a. It is located at the National
University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China and is
fully operational.

With a total computing power of 2.507
petaflops, as determined by the LINPACK benchmark which solves a
dense system of linear equations, China's new supercomputer is the
most powerful one in the world.

And NVIDIA's real bragging
rights come when the power consumption is discussed. By using
GPUs instead of purely CPUs to fuel its calculations, the
installation's power footprint is cut from an estimated 12 MW to 4.04
MW, saving enough electricity to power 5,000 homes a year.

Guangming
Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin comments, "The
performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible
without GPUs. The scientific research that is now possible with
a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more
pleased with the results."

The supercomputer is composed
of 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs. If it were
only using CPUs it would also require twice the floor space, as it
would require 50,000 CPUs to match the combined performance of the
GPUs+CPUs.

China is offering open access to computing time on
the supercomputer, but it's unclear whether Chinese researchers will
be given preference over foreign ones.

With the
addition of the new supercomputer, China now has two of the
three most powerful supercomputers in the world. The third
most powerful one -- previously in second place -- was the
Nebulae supercomputer located in
Shenzhen, which also uses NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs. It has a
peak capacity of 1.271 petaflops in LINPACK.

Tianhe-1a kicks
an American computer out of the top spot. The Jaguar
supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is now only the world's second most
powerful computer. That machine, powered by its thousands of
Opteron cores, posted 1.75 petaflop LINPACK performance.

Note: The
listed computing marks (in petaflops) were determined in LINPACK,
which is recognized as a fair means of determining total computing
power of a supercomputer. This mark is different, though from
the theoretical computing
peak. For example Nebulae has a higher theoretical computing
mark that Jaguar, but in testing Jaguar comes out on top.

“And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say?” -- Bill Gates on the Mac ads